Pbs Gives 'Blues' Different Views

Seven Filmmakers Explore Music And Its Meaning

September 28, 2003|By SEAN PICCOLI Special to the Daily Press

The people behind the PBS series "The Blues" knew their subject was large enough to sink any television treatment of it. There was no way to cover the history of blues music in a series, they figured, not even with seven nights of air time at their disposal.

So they decided not to try. Seven directors including the series' executive producer, Martin Scorsese, set out to explore the blues individually. Each took his own trail through a cultural landscape of cotton farms, juke joints and wandering musicians. One director went off the grid entirely: Wim Wenders' entry, "The Soul of a Man," shows a Voyager craft spinning away from the solar system, carrying a gold-plated disc of recorded music. The film returns to Earth for a ghostly re-enactment of the life of Texas gospel and blues singer, Blind Willie Johnson.

"We thought that it made more sense in this case to let the filmmakers have a certain amount of freedom within certain categories -- a lot of freedom, really -- and that the films be personal and impressionistic," says series producer Alex Gibney, "and that collectively they'd be a kind of film festival."

The result is a distillation of the blues, more essence than encyclopedia, that premieres tonight and runs through Oct. 4. It is the first long-form study of American music on PBS since another series, "Jazz," played to mixed reviews.

"The Blues" is unlike "Jazz," although Gibney says, "We didn't set out to measure ourselves against it." But they have downplayed the historical diligence and expository bulk that characterized "Jazz" -- and led to criticism that its creator, Ken Burns, had made the music dull.

"I like the Ken Burns series," says Marc Levin, who directed the "Blues" installment "Godfathers and Sons," "but a lot of people were frustrated by it."

Levin's entry takes a more episodic trip through the storied Chicago blues scene. Godfathers and Sons follows a Windy City visitor -- Chuck D of the New York rap group Public Enemy -- on a search for connections between urban blues and hip-hop. Levin admits that some key Chicago blues players get short shrift in this treatment. "But they just didn't fit into this story," he says.

Levin was hooked as a teenager on the music of Chicago-based Chess Records, home to Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, and a shrine to the Rolling Stones, who came from London to record there and pay homage to their influences. "That was the music that blew my mind," he says. What the films lack in complete history, Levin argues, they recoup in their directors' passion and personal relationship to the blues: "I've never seen that done in a series before, but it makes the music come alive."

The series starts with "Feel Like Going Home," directed by Scorsese, and ends Saturday with "Piano Blues," directed by Clint Eastwood. In between -- and in order -- are the Wenders film, Richard Pearce's "The Road to Memphis," Charles Burnett's "Warming by the Devil's Fire," the Levin film, and Mike Figgis' "Red, White and Blues."

It is hard to know what, exactly, to label their collected works. They have documentary aims, but some play like movies. They range in tone from Scorsese's intense Mississippi pilgrimage to Pearce's genial Memphis tour. The overall mix includes archive, voiceover, musical performance, interview, cinematic re-creation and, in one case, outright fiction. Burnett's "Warming by the Devil's Fire" is a scripted tale of a 10-year-old who learns about blues music while living with his mischievous uncle. The make-believe is cross-cut with archival footage of actual blues performers.

The filmmakers do not ignore timelines or the musical family trees. The mighty Waters appears in more than one installment. The Figgis film traces the migration of blues from America to the United Kingdom and into the hearts and minds of performers such as Eric Clapton and Van Morrison.

But "The Blues" in its own free-floating, nonlinear way raises questions beyond the material at hand: Can a documentary illuminate its subject without always informing? Can it engage a mass audience and still please the scholars?

"There are probably some terrible omissions if you look at it that way," Gibney says.

Their solution to potential sins of omission is multimedia. Most people will encounter "The Blues" through television, but there are other outlets in a project enjoying public and private sponsorship: a detailed Web site, a companion book, compact discs and a syndicated radio program. The other content, produced to coincide with what Congress has declared "The Year of the Blues," gives viewers a place to go to satisfy any curiosity excited by the films.

One participant applauds the decision to lighten the films' instructional load.